Tips to Write a SEO Optimized Article

Research your keywords always! What’s the point in spending 20-30 minutes writing a quality post, if it isn’t going to rank in the search engines? I usually choose two related keywords. I target one in the title, <h1> tag, and the content. The other will be within the content and in the <h2> tag. I personally choose keywords with exact searches between 300-500, but you can obviously shoot a little higher.

If you are a seasoned SEO, you know all about this. It’s very important to have at least the <h1> and <h2> tags. I often go all the way down to <h7>, but it depends largely on the post. Your keywords should be used in all of these tags if possible, but at the very least in h1 and h2.

Description

Again, use the keywords in the description. This is great for SEO, but many descriptions I see in the search results don’t do this. Big G will bold that keyword in the results, which will also help in making sure the user clicks on your post.

Keywords

This is pretty obvious, and I really don’t have a clue how important it is, but I still do it, and will keep doing it until it hurts me.

Post Length

Here is where I got hurt in the latest G update. I had hundreds of posts that were 300-400 words. I lost significant rankings on my long tails because of this. I firmly believe that the length of a post is extremely important to SEO, and after I went through and added to my crappy short posts, I saw significant improvement in rankings over the next month.

So how long? I don’t write a post under 800 words anymore. 800 words is the minimum, and often I will go well over 1000 (hence why I use so many header tags). Remember, big G is a content whore.

Internal Linking

This is a whole other topic in itself, but I’ll touch quickly on it. Internal linking is very important to SEO, and big G loves it, i.e Wikipedia. When you are writing your post, chances are you are going to mention something that you have mentioned before on your site. Whenever this happens, link to that post, ideally using your keywords as anchor text if possible. This will also help in lowering your bounce rate, meaning more pages viewed, meaning more possible revenue. Also if you are using analytics, I personally think google takes this into account when ranking your post, so the lower the better.